Edward 1Game Addiction: Final Fantasy 8
March 8th 2009 09:01
School would be cool if one of the HSC exams involved slaying a giant monster in a fire cavern.
You get to do that in Final Fantasy 8, a game where the player starts off as a student in a school specialised in creating skilled bodyguards, which ship off across the world.
This game got me hooked to RPG's and video gaming in general. It was one of the first games to use CGI (Computer Generated Image) as its selling point, with a setting set in the contemporary future combined with traiditional, FF elements, like witches and magic, brings a fresh feeling to the RPG genre.
Looking back: the reaction to graphics back in 1999 is like how we gauk at each pixel in the latest trailer of FF13; stunning. It was one of the few games at the time with the characters faces look similar to the CGI versions in the cut scenes. A nice touch was seeing a CGI played with the characters still controllable. The drawback is its limited to just running up and down, but it was a fine effort to still get the player involved in the game.
A perfect example of the contemporary-cross-traditional feel of the world and characters is the main character's weapon: the gunblade. With a handle like a gun attached with the sharp part of the sword, it was really refreshing to see such a weapon. Of course, using one requires a wrist made from steel, it is Final Fantasy afterall.
To add a bit of realism, money isn't dropped by animals, but comes in the form of a pay check popping up at the bottom left of the screen, with an amount based on how high you skilled the exam at the beginning of the game. I'm guessing each member has a credit card the developers forgot to mention.
Looking back at the game, I still can't seem to find an RPG world which made me felt comfortable spending hours leveling up more. If there is a machine that can travel to any gaming world, I would take it to the world of Final Fantasy 8.
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